Some encouragement for all the 42-year-olds suddenly getting into Rihanna or Rudimental: at least your midlife crisis is less dangerous than buying an unsuitably-powerful motorbike.

Streaming music service Spotify has identified 42 as the age when many of its users rediscover the joys of current pop music, as part of research into how their tastes mature over time.

“During the teenage years, we embrace music at the top of the charts more than at any other time in our lives. As we grow older, our taste in music diverges sharply from the mainstream up to age 25, and a bit less sharply after that,” explained the company on its Insights blog.

“We’re starting to listen to ‘our’ music, not ‘the’ music. Music taste reaches maturity at age 35. Around age 42, music taste briefly curves back to the popular charts — a musical midlife crisis and attempt to harken back to our youth, perhaps?”

The findings come from a study conducted by Ajay Kalia, who oversees Spotify’s “taste profiles” product, which tries to understand people’s tastes based on their listening habits.

“While teens’ music taste is dominated by incredibly popular music, this proportion drops steadily through peoples’ 20s, before their tastes “mature” in their early 30s.

Men and women listen similarly in their their teens, but after that, men’s mainstream music listening decreases much faster than it does for women.

At any age, people with children (inferred from listening habits) listen to a smaller amounts of currently-popular music than the average listener of that age.”

Sorry, fellow parents. We may be word-perfect on dozens of nursery rhymes and pre-school TV themes, but our pop savviness is in question. “Becoming a parent has an equivalent impact on your ‘music relevancy’ as ageing about four years,” wrote Kalia.

At least when we’re 42, we can embarrass our (now older) children by regularly belting out Taylor Swift choruses at the breakfast table.

Kalia stressed that parents and older music fans aren’t necessarily less cool: in fact, they may be more cool in many instances, because they’re discovering artists and genres that aren’t as mainstream.

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“Listeners discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank,” he wrote, while admitting that they also are likely to return to the music that was popular when they were teenagers.

This kind of research is more than a novelty or a marketing wheeze. Spotify and its rivals in the streaming music world – Deezer, Google, Napster, Tidal and soon Apple – are working hard to understand the tastes of their listeners, so they can make better recommendations for them.

With the price of a monthly streaming subscription fixed at £9.99 a month, and every service having more or less the same catalogue, one of the key battlegrounds will be understanding what people are listening to already, and crucially, what they might want to listen to next.

Even if that means delivering some hard realities about their “music relevancy”.